This is one of the most absurd discussions I've seen in a long time. Do we really have to wonder why so many of the leaders in the steel guitar community have had it with this forum? I won't stop to try to refute every point here - it's obvious that the crux of this is nothing less than the critical underlying premises and philosophy about what constitutes 'engineering design'.
As to "scientific" evidence, I can only refer to Ross Shafer's computer expertise in showing the fallacy in the bent rod design - the tendency for such an arrangement to bind up under rotation.
Respectfully - unless you or someone else can show somehow that there is something wrong, from a performance or reliability point of view, I completely disagree with the notion that anybody has shown anything whatsoever 'wrong' or 'flawed' with this bent-rod design. This system was
designed to work within the limits of a small-angle rotation, much the same as tube or solid-state amplifier is
designed to operate within certain voltage and/or current limits. The fact that it does not bind under the rotation for which it was
designed proves your statement
false.
Engineering design is
not descriptive science. Descriptive science is a
tool to an engineer, not a goal.
Every properly designed and engineered device is set to operate within certain limits, and every engineering scientific theory is subject to the practical limits imposed by its
use in an engineering design.
Engineering
is the art and science of making tradeoffs between design goals. There are
always tradeoffs in true engineering design. The utility of a design is
defined by how well it achieves many often competing and even contradictory goals at once. You measure an engineered system in its totality, not any single feature.
There are lots of outstanding engineering designs which do not satisfy certain peoples' aesthetic sense of how that design should look. For example - from the standpoint of someone interested in linear system theory and linear amplifiers, a vacuum tube amplifier is a complete kludge. Tubes are highly nonlinear devices that through ingenious manipulation can be made to sound great - linear within limits, nonlinear outside of those limits - but great either way. A great amp designer is a virtuoso who understands how to manipulate the design space to get the desired overall response.
The same goes for a great instrument designer. The goal is the totality of the response of the instrument. Goals like "maintain symmetry", "maintain parallelism", or other basically
engineering-
aesthetic issues are completely subservient to the response and performance of the instrument as a whole.
These contraptions are designed for musicians, not engineers. I don't give a damn whether or not someone thinks a design is elegant, to their conception of engineering aesthetics. After CBS took over Fender in 1965, they went about 'fixing' little idiosyncrasies in Leo's designs - guitars, amps, you name it. I suppose some musicians liked those changes, but the vast majority of guitar players - for whom these things were designed - wrote a very different verdict for history.
PS - U-Joints in cross rods? Are y'all serious? Y'all ever hear of Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation/design that does the job is usually the best. From the standpoint of performance, what are you trying to fix that requires yet more degrees of freedom that can be the death knell of a sustaining vibrational system?
All IMHO - but those opinions are formed from many years of various kinds of science and engineering experience. Most of the differences I read here are, IMO, due to differences in philosophy, and not science or engineering. The science here is trivial, but the philosophical differences are enormous.
